


Idolatry

by Coffin Liqueur (HP_Lovecats)



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Corpses, Dark Fantasy, Dark Romance, Destructive Relationships, Developing Relationship, F/M, Fairy Tale Style, Horror, Implied/Referenced Incest, Kinda Necrophilia-y Undertones, Magic, Self-Indulgent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:54:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22296658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HP_Lovecats/pseuds/Coffin%20Liqueur
Summary: Once upon a time, a young occultist ventured to the home of his village's finest craftsperson, the priestess of a mysterious god, to commission aparticularlyspecial tribute piece following the death of his sister.
Relationships: Shinguji Korekiyo/Yonaga Angie
Kudos: 16





	1. The Wax Doll

In the cool of a still, cloudy afternoon, a bereaved young man stood dressed in black before the hut of  _ Kibougamine-no-mura _ ’s most acclaimed artist with a small, painted portrait in his hands. The portrait, while it easily could have been mistaken for one of himself, depicted a young woman. Her hair was long and black, like his. Her features at once sharp and lacking harshness, like his; keen and slim and graceful, like his. She had a smile with the elegant curve of a longbow.

He wore the very same sort of smile, behind the mask covering the lower half of his face, which he adjusted with a light tug before pulling a cord beside the door and sending a set of glassy chimes ringing and dancing.

It wasn’t seconds before his ringing of the chimes was answered, which took him aback slightly - he stood just that much taller and straighter on the  _ crack  _ of the wooden door as it began to open inward before the artist flitted into view from behind it.

She had been expecting him. And he, likewise, anticipated due to his knowledge of her nature that when greeted him with her blue eyes wide and bright, and her smile almost giddily sunny.

“Ahh, hello, hello!” she cooed, waving in wide, sweeping arches; in return, he bowed. “Korekiyo Shinguji, yes?” she carried on. “Atua and I have been waiting for you for longer than you may think, you know!”

Despite the delivery as if Atua was a housemate, workmate, or other such simple partner of hers, Korekiyo the Occultist knew well who she was speaking of.

You see, Angie Yonaga may have been known throughout  _ Kibougamine-no-mura _ as the Artist and Craftswoman, but she referred to herself as neither of those things. No, she styled herself, instead, as Angie, the Priestess. While she left no question  _ who  _ she was priestess to, it was ill-understood  _ what _ , precisely, she was priestess to - she spoke of Atua often, but always in a manner that communicated very little about his nature as a deity. Even the Occultist’s extensive research across the land of various religious and mystical practices, widespread beliefs and cults seldom even whispered of, had given him no knowledge which he could attach to the name.

All that was clear was that Atua always seemed to want what  _ she  _ seemed to want, and that all that occurred was ultimately right and good and for the best, as it was Atua’s will.

This seemed to particularly apply to her art. She claimed often that every sculpture, every carving, every portrait, every string of beads she created was born out of divine inspiration, regardless of what it depicted. Her status as Artist and Craftswoman did, indeed, simply follow as an extension of her perceiving herself as a Priestess.

The unique fervor behind her creation is part of what brought the Occultist to her door. They both knew this, and so she turned on the bare soles of her feet and nearly skipped back into her single-room hut with nothing but a single look - still bright-eyed and beaming - over her shoulder to confirm he was following. He began doing so on this cue, gliding after her like shadow and dark wind.

Her works lined the walls that they passed as they rounded her hearth, casting strange shapes in the high windows and tinting the gray light that shafted in from outside them. He regarded them with flicks of his eyes - landscapes painted and washed with home-distilled inks, marching lines of figurines shaped from home-dug clay and decorated with crystals gathered with a birdlike natural fine-eye. There was always something new to observe about them; some part of the brain, on looking at each one, he found, still found that he was looking at each one for the first time. He had not - he had studied her works extensively, by now, partly because he had never encountered art before that had had this effect on him: this uncanniness as if they came from nothing, just as her stripe of supposed ceremonial tradition seemed to.

On the wooden table she guided him to in the back of the hut, there was an exception. What appeared to be the beginning of a new piece - a lump of pale wax, from which protruded the shape of a head. He arched an eyebrow at her; she simply turned to him, gave the little cushion sitting at one side of the table a gentle sideways “kick”, and dropped herself to sit on one opposite it.

He took this action on her part as permission for him to sit as well. He bowed again and did so.

Once they sat, her in full lotus and him kneeling, she gave his attention very little room to continue contemplating the barely-formed statuette between them. She leaned forward, her eyelids flittering like butterflies until they flashed at him in a way that seemed almost wider than they had been before.

“You have come to me,” she began, with a tilt of her head, “to request a funeral portrait, have you not?”

“Yes,” the Occultist said, with another smile subtly arching behind his mask. It faded as he lifted the small portrait he had brought - a quick flicking look downwards at it before he passed it across the table. “My older sister was taken by illness this winter. As the last surviving member of my family, I have all I shall need to see her into the afterlife with the ceremony that a person so dear to me is rightfully due - except for a portrait… fit for the occasion.”

She’d begun surveying it as he spoke the way a child might survey a strange new animal, or an unfamiliar shape on the wall. Once he finished, she took it.

After a few seconds, she looked up. Then back down, then back up. She beamed.

The Occultist hummed one faint, soft, smoky note in questioning.

“Oooooooooh, the two of you look  _ very  _ alike,” she said, cheerily as if they hadn’t been discussing a dead woman. “You said she was your bigger sister, didn’t you? You’re her spitting image.”

Unoffended, the Occultist smiled and bowed a nod. “It has been found that people often come to look like those who they spend the most time with,” he said. “I would almost expect that I’ve come to take quite a bit after her.”

The Artist said not a word to that. Instead, she set the little portrait down. The Occultist’s brow arched again - but as she produced a lit candle from underneath the table and began to take it to the lump of wax in front of him, he began to understand, and his eyes began to widen in a tentative fascination.

The wax warmed with a surprising quickness, and surprisingly quick, too, was her work. She began molding and pinching and shaping until the little formless translucent thing in front of them started to stand on two tall legs. Arms began to lift out from its sides. Curtains of hair began to fall and curve. His eyes watched her face just as much as her hands - all the while as she worked, she smiled almost dumbly, blithely, abundantly happy without knowing what about.

At the end of it all, her hands stilled with a fresh wax doll cooling in her fingers.   


“This will look familiar, I think,” she finally said, turning it to face him and lowering over the table behind it, looking at the Occultist from under the white hair hanging over her forehead like she was a cat peeking out from under the shade of a fern. “It may even look more familiar than the little painting you brought to me.”

As the Occultist sized up the new little statuette, his eyes widened anew, for she was right. The hair of this colorless wax figure was long. What features it had were at once sharp and lacking harshness; keen, and slim, and graceful. By modeling her sculpture after him as he sat across from her, the Artist had, indeed, produced the beginnings of a perfect likeness of his sister.

All it was missing was her smile, with the elegant curve of a longbow.

The Occultist was impressed. When he told her this, the Artist giggled like a child. As she spoke, she swayed, as if dancing in her seat

“Your ritual doesn’t need a  _ portrait _ , does it?” she asked him. “You never said that. And now I know it must be true, because Atua cannot have had me bring out my wax before your visit for no reason at all - not when he knew what you wanted, too!

“We  _ must  _ honor this divine spark of inspiration - we must fan it! As we speak, I have many other divine works to pursue - but, but! If you will return to me at this time tomorrow, dressed as you wish to see it dressed, so that we may begin painting the figure, then in no time at all, you will have a tribute to your sister more than worthy of any kind of funeral. You will look at the finished work and feel as if your sister is with you again - and Atua will be there smiling on her ceremony, shining his light down on her!”

It was true that, to the knowledge of the Occultist, any kind of effigy or likeness of his sister would be appropriate for what he needed, and by the Artist’s confidence in her inspiration for this approach, he was made all the more assured in the quality of the piece he could expect from her.

He agreed, bowed, took his portrait back, paid her for the beginnings of her work, and left, while behind him, the little wax figure stared without a face.


	2. The Occultist's Cellar

Now, the Occultist had lied to the Artist.

Not about the loss of his beloved sister, nor about his need for a crafted object in her likeness, preferably as faithful and beautiful as such a fine craftsperson as Angie Yonaga could manage.

He had, however, lied about exactly what the purpose of the likeness would be.

You see, he did not intend to hold a funeral for his sister at all.   


Instead, he had her mummified in the dry, dusty cellar of his hut, a tomblike place of gnarled and withered roots and black corners lit only by the single candle he brought in with him the night after his visit to the Artist, as he had been doing every night since her passing.

It was a place where the air crushed and suffocated, as the Occultist wished for the things inside it to remain eternal: as untouched by condition and change as possible, whether in the form of a kiss of heat from any more powerful or natural light or a simple shift in the air around it.

The most important of the sacred things he kept in this cellar to preserve, of course, were not any of the twisted ritualistic statues or paintings of long-forgotten gods, or death-masks hung on spikes from the walls with their stony visages, or the vials of mysterious liqueurs used to prepare the minds of vessels to be entered by spirits in dark-of-night seances which he had promised to himself he would never open.

It was, of course, his sister, who lay on a stone slab, her body wrapped in fragrant dried silks and draped in her favorite violet kimono. Her hair, long and serpent-tongue black like his, fanned across the stone around her in a halo; her arms were just-out at her sides, palms up and fingers curled by stiffening in death, and as the Occultist approached her, he thought that it looked almost as if she was holding them out deliberately, in greeting.

The Occultist’s sister had been very beautiful in life. It would not have done, or so he had thought, to arrange her body in any way without a sense of balance, grace, and artistry.

He had, however, also accounted for many practicalities.

In addition to the mummification, the Occultist had spared no attention and none of his ritual knowledge in marking the edges of the stone, all the way round, with sigils and spellwords. The carved heads of protecting beasts sat roaring back-to-back where corners met; prayers in a hundred forgotten tongues wished his sister’s spirit rest, and in a hundred more, wished for her body to remain uncorrupted by any touch of age or rot or insect.

Webs of wells filled with salt lacing through the images and words, meanwhile, were for the purpose of binding, so that her spirit may never be lost.

After he inspected these last, in particular, with his candle brought close and his head leaned low by his sister’s side, to ensure that the salt had not somehow emptied or found itself disturbed, the Occultist crossed to the back of the cellar - where the air was deadest - and then knelt before a cabinet. He opened it to an array of heavy clay pots. He selected one, returned to his sister, and began anointing the body with the thin and oily liquid inside, watching to ensure that no drop was wasted as he scattered it from the downturned tips of his fingers. Dots darkened her dress near-black where they fell in the lightlessness of the cellar, and then dried to pure violet again.

He returned to the cabinet and then replaced the jar with another. He repeated the process, and then replaced that jar with another, smearing the paste into the many grooves he’d carved along the sides of the slab. From another jar, he ate a small dried fruit which tasted of dust and wine, and then recited a long and somber incantation in sounds that he had needed years to train his mouth to make with precision, his hand over his heart and his head bowed.

Once the incantation was complete, he knelt beside the slab. He gingerly took his sister’s hand, in its slippery silk bindings; pulled his mask down from his face; and kissed it.

Then he stood, sadly regarding the swath of white bandages wrapped around what he knew should be his sister’s lovely face.

“I hope that you are resting well, dear Sister,” he said to the body with a solemn smile, his voice a rattling whisper. “I know the loneliness must be unbearable, but at last, I can promise with certainty that you won’t have to endure it much longer.”

He thought of the wax doll, and into his smile crept a note of joy.

“In days,” he said, “I’ll finally have all I need to bring you back to the world of the living; back to our home; back to me.”

With a kiss pressed to the body’s wrapped face, he ascended the ladder from the cellar to the lantern-lighting of his hut. When he slept that night, he dreamed of the doll, and saw it not faceless, but smiling at him.

Sure enough, when he returned to the Artist’s hut the following afternoon, he was met with the doll sitting on the table where the Artist had begun sculpting it in front of him, now bearing the outlines of two sharp eyes, and the curve of a bowlike smile.


End file.
